“In business, being able to read people and quickly get a sense of who you’re dealing with is an invaluable skill. It turns your encounter with a client into an opportunity to catch a glimpse of the upcoming project and how it will need to be handled. It is one of the building blocks of a professional relationship.”
Building relationships is essential (ok, I’m stating the obvious). And we’ve found that sustaining them is almost fully attributable to our (1) being forthright and (2) doing what we say we’re going to do … exceptionally well.
To my first point, clients need to know *us* just as much as we need to know them. Being forthright about our recommendations, expectations, and processes is a primary reason we’ve grown in a down economy. Yes, being honest means sometimes giving some tough love so they can understand the pros and cons of pursuing various options in today’s digital landscape. But being proactive is key; everyone deserves to have the facts up-front to avoid unpleasant surprises later.
To my second point, the buck stops here. Recommendations are just wasted effort without proper execution. If we receive a request that doesn’t align with our core strengths, we’ll recommend a specialized partner instead. When it comes to execution, we *know* that clients are paying for the best, so we execute the best work every time.
In the end, it’s our brand. Honesty and integrity command respect, and we know that’s a two-way street.
Lately, we’ve been asking ourselves what can we do to help budget conscious firms rise to new levels. (What can we say? We love helping new businesses to take-off and established businesses to expand.)
The answer is to give them high-end, feature rich, and easy-to-update websites at a low-cost. These websites take the form of bundled packages that take the pressure off small business owners – they sign up to have a digital partner in us, and we help them get up and running with a more sophisticated website to suit their needs.
What makes our pre-packaged websites for new and growing businesses unique is that the same people who are building sophisticated technology for Federal agencies and successful businesses will be applying their expertise to small businesses. Even with a modest budget, small business owners can now benefit from the positive transformative effects smart websites can have on their bottom lines.
Plus, we benefit by continually innovating ways to work more efficiently and to deliver greater value at a given cost. We can then carry this knowledge back to our government and large enterprise clients, giving them leading edge work more effectively than our competitors. And the best part…we do it all without outsourcing outside the U.S. We keep the jobs here.
I’m really excited about this new offering. I got my start in business doing grunt work for start-ups …writing business plans, creating revenue models, researching target audiences, customizing technology, etc. Once you get the bug, it’s hard to get rid of it. Our services for new and growing businesses keeps us agile for our big clients while keeping us in touch with our roots—the small businesses that are the cornerstone and driver of our economy.
Steve Fisher of AppSolve charged the room in the afternoon with some some hilarious, unfortunate, and expensive examples of how to (and not to) present yourself on business cards before the day closed with Women Grow Business’ Jill Foster moderating a panel on social media.
Overall, we took several pages of notes and had conversations with tons of bright, driven people who all came together to learn about how they can grow — and help the larger DC market (and beyond) continue its upward swinging economic course. The event was valuable both in terms of new learning and discussing real opportunities with other business owners about how we can help them grow.
Our designs reflect clients’ brands in the best possible light. They communicate in a visual language that the target audience will understand and respond to. These primary considerations drive my creation of a design composition (comp). But, secondarily, I always push myself to create something that I feel excited about.
Some brands naturally are easier for me to connect with than others, but I find a connection in order to create something engaging. For example, when we recently created visual concepts for Waterwisp.com — an e-commerce website that sells fly-fishing flies and other related gear — I couldn’t really draw on personal experience; I’m not a fly-fisherman. But, ever since watching (and loving) “A River Runs Through It” as a kid, I’ve been able to relate to the motivation for getting out on a river at sunrise and being in nature, just enjoying the solitude it can offer.
So, I married those thoughts with the assumptions outlined in our Creative Brief, which included:
Site Objectives: Driving sales of Waterwisp products, educating on tips/techniques, and community building
Audience Demographics: Wealthy fly-fishermen, avid fly-fishermen, and retailers/dealers
Differentiators: The hook sits above the water rather than on the water, thus making the fly look more like a real insect.
Top Execution Consideration: The fly should be the most important visual element.
Below is a screenshot of their existing site:
Here is the I took for the homepage. Please click on the image to view at full resolution.
It’s great to see how some initial conversations and assumptive brainstorming can lead to a more sophisticated visual concept that would elevate Waterwisp’s brand to another level. And, when coupled with targeted marketing strategy we provide, we’re destined to catch some bigger fish for this fly-fishing industry leader. (Predictable pun intended.)
After waiting on hold for 10 minutes to speak with a customer service representative about a personal invoice I received recently, I was greeted by someone who clearly did not want to be on the other end of the phone. When I said I didn’t appreciate his condescending tone, he said, “Well, I can stop talking.”
I wondered in that moment if his employer realized the organization’s integrity was being compromised by someone it was actually paying to interact with consumers like me (who will now associate that frustrating experience with the organization’s brand).
Luckily, innumerable customer service folks have shown consideration (and compassion) as representatives of their larger brand’s integrity. I’m sure it’s been exhausting during sensitive or tough conversations, too. But building bridges with consumers certainly fuels word-of-mouth promotion and strengthens brand loyalty.
Two examples: There’s a heart-warming anecdote about a Zappo’s employee sending flowers to a customer struck by tragedy — after the customer asked for refund. As the text mentions, the recipient of Zappo’s sympathies became a vocal proponent. A patient Southwest employee gave me a voucher equivalent to the cost of my flight — after she explained that, even though I spent six hours in the air between Baltimore and Cleveland before being diverted to Columbus, they don’t reimburse flights disrupted by weather. I’ve only flown Southwest since then, as have two of my friends impressed by my tale.
These examples of individuals representing their brands so positively truly inspire me. They only further my commitment to represent Tellenger with unwavering integrity and respect, and in doing so, to help myself and my brand to grow and thrive.
Where I see the most opportunity for capitalizing on web and mobile technology is for traditional, old-line businesses and organizations, not just high-tech firms. These are the firms that can use the technology to create even greater value. Manufacturing, retail shops, even agriculture can realize efficiencies and create new opportunities using these technologies. Government is the perfect example. In the government, things have been done largely the same way since the advent of the “modern bureaucracy” during China’s Qin Dynasty well over 2000 years ago. Slowly people in bureaucracies are looking at their processes and procedures, then asking, “How can technology improve the way we work?” For example, the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves used paper-based processes to schedule training and administer attendance and performance. Since pay is linked to these records, errors made on paper created problems with issuing accurate checks in a timely manner. Automating the system not only made it easier to manage drills, it reduced the lag in pay from months in some cases to the standard of two weeks.
It is the intersection of web and mobile technologies with traditional ways of doing things that is the most exciting because it can yield the greatest results. The firm Legal River created a platform to link small businesses with a legal problem to quality lawyers able to solve the problem. They used technology to address the issue of “how do I find a good attorney.” Manufacturing plants are using mobile phone applications to monitor assembly line metrics, which are automatically input into a web technology that generates performance reports broken down by machine, worker, and hour. Small mom and pop retail shops can use the web to not only sell products across the world, but to reach highly defined niche target markets of people most likely to buy their products.
Using technology to make traditional businesses and everyday processes better is where the real innovation exists. And this is what makes our jobs so rewarding.
I received a call today from an entrepreneur with a new start-up idea. He was concerned because he doesn’t understand the nuts-and-bolts of the technology that will be required to launch his business, so he asked me where to start. In his situation, the technology for implementing the idea was not proprietary or even critical to the execution. These days technology is often a commodity used to execute a business concept. For example, if your business model involves an eCommerce or social media site there are so many “out of the box” technologies that can be uniquely customized to execute the business idea it simply isn’t necessary for the entrepreneur to dig deeply into the technology, a basic understanding is sufficient.
The entrepreneur who called me would get more value and productivity out of hiring experts to build the back-end and front-end of his idea rather than trying to figure out how to manage doing it himself. The highest and best use of his limited time and energy is to fully flesh out the idea, develop prototypes, create the brand, refine the user experience, and, of course, figure out how his idea will attract users and generate revenue. Even though he’s starting an online business, the technology driving that business will not be what makes or breaks the new company. It is the viability of the business model.
Federal Computer Week published an article encouraging government-related websites to quickly adopt six key features:
Transparency
Collaboration
Searchability
Engagement
Archiving
Better Services
Arguably, most websites out there — not just government focused sites — should demonstrate these characteristics. But I think that shift to meet these expectations will be slow, even with aggressive mandates from the Obama Administration.
I think engagement will require a particularly dramatic shift based on my experiences at a recent Open Government Innovations conference I attended. In one session, I found myself rather passionately defending user experience after someone challenged a panel of designers, saying, “Well, it might be prettier. But it’s not compliant, and we can’t have our sites not be compliant.”
“It” in this case was a design composition — a flat image — so it definitely wasn’t compliant at that point … it wasn’t even a website! Of course, it’s imperative that sites be compliant, but technology today ensures that we can integrate improvements in information architecture and usability to visually represent data in a more engaging way while meeting existing 508 criteria.
And adhering to existing requirements while capitalizing on the engagement promoted by the technology advancements of today’s digital marketplace certainly is one way to bolster user involvement in government online.
I’m often asked if we at Tellenger “do social media.” My short answer is “Yes.” People generally want to know if we do both social media campaign planning and execution (yes), and at what rate (approximately $130/hr, depending on the complexity of the project).
But I normally probe a bit more about what people want to achieve, because social media is more than just having a Twitter account or a Facebook page. In response, I’ve heard:
More sales. (Actual conversions from campaigns)
More traffic. (Higher numbers in general)
More brand awareness. (Greater presence in existing social networks)
Wins over the competition. (More sales and social media followers alike)
More customer feedback. (The right vehicles to encourage audience interaction)
Each client’s social media strategy is different, and each of these questions carries with it important elements that not EVERY client would need. For example, our social media strategy at Tellenger is participatory — we individually have been building our social media profiles for years, but only recently started a company blog collectively. By contrast, we’re working with someone who is preparing to launch a product, and driving sales is The Sole Purpose for his exploring social media in the first place, so careful planning, detailed execution, and daily analysis are absolutes.
Social media campaigns can be tremendously successful when done in consult with existing marketing and messaging, in consideration of the great, back-end capabilities that can be integrated, and with proper measurement that allows for instant evolution (i.e. Do more of what’s working; immediately stop doing what isn’t). Most people can’t afford to lose money right now, and the instant feedback that social media monitoring provides allows for business owners to see the performance metrics that are essential to their making informed, immediate decisions.
Of course, asking the right questions early to discover “what do you want to achieve with social media?” is Step One.
After more than two years working to help clients leverage web technologies, we finally obligated time to rebuild our website. On the front-end there is a new visual design providing a fresher look that aligns with our brand identity. We used jquery to present more information without having to load new pages (and to make the site more dynamic), improved the Information Architecture (IA) and User Experience (UX) to make it easier for visitors to find information and for Tellenger to communicate our core messages. And, of course, we’ve increased our use of social media and real-time technologies.
On the back-end, we’ve utilized WordPress as a content management system as well as a blog. We have super clean code for greater efficiency and employ an uber-reliable host. Of course, Google Analytics keeps us informed of key site data and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) make us easy to find online.
The site is a reflection of what we preach: Technology driven by business objectives. Our objectives were to (1) clarify our brand, (2) clearly communicate our capabilities and experience, (3) leverage social media to increase site traffic, (4) make our website faster and easier to manage, and (5) use Tellenger.com to increase sales and brand awareness. Early data shows we’re off to a great start.
